Diary of a Bodybuilder - Karl Adams

Firstly a little bit about myself, I have been bodybuilding now for nearly a decade and seen some massive changes in the shape and size of my body in that time. My goal was always to get as big as I could possibly be NATURALLY, no steroids, no testosterone boosters, no growth hormones, just food, food / vitamin supplements and a gym with enough weights. Before I begin you must know, there is no quick and easy way to do this, it involves a lot of dedication, hard work, hours in the gym lifting unbelievably heavy weights with respect to your size and maintaining consistency. Not to mention the large food and supplements bills that come with the lifestyle that is bodybuilding and creating the biggest / strongest version of yourself. So if all that sounds too much, time to stop reading.

Before any person steps foot inside a gym they should know exactly what they want to get out of it. Having an end goal is essential to achieving the results you want. This is made up of smaller goals throughout the period of months / years / decades it takes to get what you desire, but I'll explain this later in more detail. The end goal should be visual or measurable and should be realistic, there is no value in the natural trainer thinking he’s going to be the next Ronnie Coleman or Jay Cutler. It won't happen, the plethora of drug using trainers has set a massive divide, easily distinguishing the difference between the two. Therefore this will always leave you feeling disappointed and training will be negatively effected by this. If you want some better visual goals, check out the bodybuilders from the 60’s and 70’s, their proportions are more realistic and aesthetically pleasing, but more importantly achievable. Find what you want and you shall have it.



Choosing the gym, in my experience the more popular or mainstream gyms are not the best places to build massive muscle. Far to many distractions which removes your focus from what your there to do, grow! Exercise bikes with internet connection and isolation machines for just about every muscle in the body are useless, you need a big selection of barbells, dumbbells and benches, that’s it. When your in the gym all that should be going through your mind is your routine and how your going to smash new personal bests. Take away the distraction to get the best results.

Designing your routine is the biggest variable of any aspiring mass builder, finding a balance of rest, recovery and growth within the shortest period of time before you train the muscle again. I am a firm believer in training muscle groups on different days, getting the absolute most from the muscle being trained before the session is over. This is the best way to promote hypertrophy. Tearing the muscle down so it can be repaired bigger and stronger to meet the new demands you’ve placed upon it. The only way to grow. You have to consider your outside life when designing a workout, you’ll find out you have stronger days when you have more energy and weaker days when you fatigue quicker. This is natural mainly due to your working life, you need the money to fund your Tescos bill and supplement provider. I work a 4 days on, 4 days off shift pattern in my profession and so I created my routine to suit that, over an 8 day period I train, 3 days on, 1 day off, 3 days on, 1 day off then repeat. I found that less time between workouts can lead to overtraining and the dreaded plateaux, which any bodybuilder needs to try to avoid at all costs if they want to build big muscles in the quickest amount of time. Now time to discuss muscle group training and where to put them in your routine. A lot of you may hate this and there’s undoubted thousands of threads on the internet about it but the biggest and most important workout to consider is legs day. Rule number one in natural bodybuilding for mass is if your whole body isn’t growing together, you’ll never reach your natural potential, FACT! Legs is so often overlooked and left out for one simple reason, its physical the hardest and most demanding workout going. So I always recommend you train legs on an off day at work, when you have the most energy and time to beast your legs until your walking like you’ve left a present in your undercrackers. Once you’ve chosen where that fits in your routine, then the rest falls into place. Follow this principle to reduce overtraining and injury: push; legs; pull; off; push; legs; pull; off. Simple.




Here is my workout to give you an idea:



Days on Days off

1. Chest (Push) 5. Shoulders, Triceps (Push)
2. Calves, Traps (Legs) 6. Legs and lower back (Legs)
3. Chins, Abs (Pull) 7. Rows, Biceps and forearms (Pull)
4. Off 8. Off

As you can see my days off from work are far more intense than my days on. Utilising the fact that my energy levels will be higher and therefore get the most from my workouts. The first part of each workout is your primary muscle groups, areas in which you need to push your body to the excess to achieve maximum results. The second and sometimes third muscle groups are secondary and should only be trained if your body is not too fatigued to continue or this will also lead to overtraining. It was designed in a way that the secondary muscles groups will get worked in the first with the exception of traps and abs. So don’t feel disappointed if you have nothing left to give after a shoulder workout and you don’t have anything left for triceps. Learn to listen to your body and take rest where its needed. If your only giving 75% its time to go home, your wasting your time. Eat, sleep, grow and come back stronger next time. Not everyone works the same shift as me but you can all apply the same principles to create your routines.

Now you have established what muscle is going to get ruined and where, you now have to do the work. After training for many years I soon found out to my detriment that training for PB’s every week is a fruitless task, injuries will set in, in no time. Your body can not cope with that amount of stress day in day out, your muscles are getting bigger and stronger but your ligaments, tendons and joints take a hammering when your pushing through into new found territory. I worked out that training for PB’s was safest every third week, giving your body a chance to repair and grow.

Some exercises are safer than others to train to one rep max (ORM), for example bench press is easily performed safely when a trustworthy spotter is at hand. But squats is dangerous in my opinion, even with a spotter, when pushing for a ORM injuries are only an arched back away! So when squatting I never go lower than 3 reps, making that my PB. Having a good spotter is essential to gaining muscle mass and if you can find a gym buddy wanting the same end goal as you that is priceless. Helping each other, pushing each other to your limits, better than any protein shake or chicken breast.



As I said previously, pushing your body to its limit is the only way to grow if you can do 10 reps, why do your muscles need to get any bigger… you can already do it. Training hard and heavy forces your body to adapt. I can not stress this enough, learn where your limits are and break them, using a simple technique, progressive poundage. When your going for new PB’s add small amounts to the bar, don’t throw on the nearest 20kg plate and hope for the best, you’ll fail and plateau. For example if you added 2.5kg on each end of the bar for bench press every third week, within a year you’ll have added 85kg to the total. Obviously this may not increase every single third week but with consistent training and dedication 50kg is still a huge increase in one year and this is definitely within your reach if you follow this advise. Apply that to every primary exercise (Bench press, deadlift, squat, shoulder press, barbell row, chins) and imagine the huge steps in the right direction to a massive physic without a steroid in sight. Its achievable, I am proof and practice everything I preach. After every workout you need to leave the gym feeling satisfied that you pushed yourself to the limit, reaching your failures and using the spotter / gym buddy or your body will not grow. You can not define muscles that do not exist. Build your foundation using spotless technique and consistently testing yourself.

I have always followed this basic rule when deciding what to eat for my next meal, 40g protein and 80g carbohydrates every 3 hours. You can choose any mixture of food to obtain these values as long as they are reached. This is the maximum a natural bodybuilder can absorb over that given time frame, any extra will get excreted and is therefore a waste of money and can over work already hard grafting organs.

The key is to eat small portions every 3 hours, for me this means I'll usually have a 6 meal a day plan consisting of chicken, fish, eggs and protein shakes. The carbohydrates coming from pasta, rice, fruits, vegetables and porridge. Vitamin supplements are also a must, training heavy in the gym will undoubtedly take its toll on joints so a good glucosamine and chondroitin tablet will be required.


I started to get an ache behind one of my knee caps from heavy squatting, after about 6 weeks of taking these tablets the pain was gone and has never come back. I also take a whole range of vitamin supplements to aid my energy levels and general health but with a growing food bill these are optional and buy whatever your budget will stretch too.

There is a massive range of protein supplements on the market these days so choosing one for you is fairly easy, most taste good and mix well but make sure they have a wide range of BCAA’s and the digestive enzymes present. It's useless having a high protein diet and no way of fully breaking it down once its in your system or it’ll end up in the toilet along with your hard earned money and sore muscles because the protein has never reached them. Again there are hundreds of other bodybuilding supplements around and you should buy them depending on your needs and budgets. Some are gimmicks and some effective.

If your struggling with fatigued and sore muscles for extended periods try a BCAA supplement or maybe your routine needs to be stretched out, add an extra rest day. I found that glutamine helps retain muscle mass when dieting so this maybe helpful if your thinking of competing. There is so much information on the internet about supplements, reading the customer reviews is always a good indicator of whether or not its going to work. So take the time to read and research before you buy. I really hope reading this has helped you gain extra motivation and knowledge about gaining muscle, I’ve loved the lifestyle and everything it has brought to me.

One last thought before you go, if you do decide to use drugs to gain an extra inch here or there and never compete or make anything from it, was it really worth it… for vanities sake? Risk having major health problems. I’ll be in the gym training in my 50’s, will you? Think about it.


Discuss on the MP Forum.

Written by Karl Adams, lover of all things bodybuilding and power lifting. Giving thanks to the people who helped me along the way, Alexander Ferentinos (look him up on facebook or twitter, offers consultancy and advise) with his endless knowledge of nutrition and to the Felixstowe dock gym boys, for without there constant spots and putting up with all my wide range of grunts, noises and mess none of this would have been possible. Thank you